Lieutenant Mower gave Luo Qi the impression of a rabid rhinoceros—or a train that had come off the rails.
She would spot her target, let out a roar, accelerate with a thud-thud-thud, then charge straight ahead and smash into a wall, or stumble from losing her balance and nearly fall into the water.
After going berserk, her strength had increased dramatically, but she had lost all reason and judgment. She kept flickering forward with those swish-swish-swish bursts of speed, only to slam into walls with a series of bang bang bang crashes.
A Militech lieutenant.
Special forces, no less.
At minimum, she had the kind of combat power you'd expect from NCPD MaxTac. And with those terrifying military-grade implants enhancing her—
when she fought…
she was a goddamn monster.
Luo Qi threw himself into a clumsy roll and barely avoided another incoming punch, his scalp tingling with fear.
The fist tore through the air with a shriek, grazing past his face.
"Hey, hey, hey, I'm warning you, don't push it too far. If I get serious—"
Luo Qi tried to sound imposing, only to watch Mower shakily rise to her feet and slowly turn back toward him.
Gulp.
He swallowed hard.
That crushing pressure made his confidence start to wobble.
"Urrghh—AAAHHH—waaaaaagh——!!!!"
At long last, after smashing into walls one too many times—literally—Mower finally gave up on all technique and just charged Luo Qi head-on in long, pounding strides.
A black blur tore through the air, trailing afterimages. The metallic ring of a blade leaving its sheath came in the next instant.
One slash.
Straight for the throat.
Time seemed to slow.
Moonlight slipped between the towering apartment blocks and fell across the rippling water.
A twenty-four-hour convenience store nearby was playing cheerful pop music.
The lights of countless homes glowed in the night, scattered and uneven.
And in this hidden little courtyard, you could hear the deepest, lowest breathing of the city itself.
Crack.
Luo Qi seized her knife wrist with absolute precision and drove a palm strike into her abdomen.
"Hah!!"
Lieutenant Mower's body was yanked off balance and hauled upward, tracing a sharp, clean arc through the air before her back slammed hard into the shallow flooded ground.
Water exploded outward in waves.
Everything settled.
The short blade flew out of her hand and plunged into the water with a dull thunk, the ripples shattering its cold reflection into countless fragments.
"Hoo— almost wiped out there," Luo Qi said, letting out a long breath and wiping cold sweat from his forehead as he watched Mower writhe in pain in the water. "I told you, if you'd surrendered earlier, you wouldn't have had to suffer."
Her body had long since exceeded its limit from all that overloaded bursting power. She had multiple gunshot wounds, and she had beaten herself up smashing into walls. That shoulder throw had knocked the last bit of air out of her.
If not for the passive stimulation from her military-grade implants, she would've blacked out already.
That brutal impact was enough to make her stay down and "calm down" in the water for a while.
He pulled off her comms unit and sat to the side, leisurely checking the data inside.
"Hey, it's Lucky." Tiredness colored Luo Qi's voice as he called Regina.
"Well? Did you get it done?"
"I got the data off her. Sending it to you now. She's Militech special forces. Looks like she realized she was at risk of losing control, so she went to see a doctor. Militech didn't help her, though. Instead they sent one team… no, two teams after her. She wiped them all out."
"Excellent." Regina nodded. "I'll send a vehicle over right away."
"No need. She's dead."
As he said that, Luo Qi tilted the PDA camera toward Mower on the ground.
She lay there under his boot, completely motionless, soaking in the water like a discarded strip of kelp.
"Didn't I tell you to hold back?" Regina frowned.
"She was too badly hurt. The moment she hit the ground, she stopped breathing. Nothing I could do." Luo Qi shrugged. "It's fine. Worst case, next time I'll catch you a few more. Night City's huge. Cyberpsychos are everywhere. Losing one doesn't matter."
"Alright. Be more careful next time. Payment's been transferred."
Regina sighed and hung up, never noticing the small, scheming smile that crept across Luo Qi's face.
The instant the call ended, Luo Qi lifted his foot.
Only then did the Mower pinned under the water start sucking in air in painful gasps, coughing up mouthful after mouthful of water.
"Cough—cough cough cough…!!"
She wasn't dead at all.
She had simply been pinned in place under Luo Qi's foot, unable to move.
Even with her brain reduced to mush, Mower could still feel danger in her bones.
She had never felt this much threat from another human being before. That single instant of defeat, that overwhelming exchange, and that foot that had felt as heavy as a hydraulic press—
it was as if she wasn't facing a person at all, but some monstrous machine with terrifying strength.
But the agony inside her body, so intense it bordered on madness, was still wringing out the last scraps of her strength.
"Waaaaaagh…!!"
"Kill meeeeeee—!!"
Clutching at her chest, Mower rolled helplessly in the water even though she barely had any strength left.
"Ah… who could've seen this coming?" Luo Qi sighed and bent down to haul her up under one arm.
At this point, apart from flailing wildly, Mower wasn't much harder to handle than a giant golden retriever.
"Alright, move along, move along—taxi!"
Grinning fiercely, Luo Qi scared off the gawking onlookers, then used thoroughly impolite methods to stop a cab that was clearly trying to get the hell out of there.
"Drive. Bradbury Street."
The driver had no choice. Under the twin pressures of gunpoint and money, he tremblingly drove Luo Qi to the familiar old place.
Luo Qi kicked the metal door open, scaring off a couple hanging around the vending machine, then dragged Mower—who was writhing like a small motor—down into the dark, creepy basement.
Here, he was about to do certain things to the body of this "weak, pitiful, helpless" woman that definitely should not be seen by others.
Hia hia hia~
"Hey, Vik! Customer delivery!"
Luo Qi shouted as he yanked open the diamond-pattern iron gate with a clatter.
"Oh. Lucky." Viktor pushed up his glasses and paused the boxing match he had been watching. "What brings you in today? And what exactly did you drag back with you?"
"Militech lieutenant. Probably got some kind of experimental implant installed. She was in so much pain she went completely psycho, and then Militech sent people to silence her. So, well, I flattened her and brought her here."
Luo Qi tossed Mower onto the dental-chair-looking recliner, then cuffed her wrists and ankles down with irresistible force.
"Alright. Let me take a look."
Viktor's voice was as calm as ever.
The data line connected. He started working like a man possessed.
Luo Qi understood absolutely none of it.
"Hold her down for me. If she keeps thrashing, my chair's going to fall apart," Viktor said. "Mm… her hormone levels are completely wrecked. Whatever that thing is, it's done serious damage."
"Can you save her, Vik?" Luo Qi asked. "And does she have any software backdoors or tracking still on her?"
"Relax." Viktor spoke slowly, unhurriedly. "Everything you thought of, I already thought of. I've stripped it all out. For now, at least, nobody's coming to bother us."
One sedative shot later, combined with disconnecting the malfunctioning implant from her nervous system, Mower's pain finally eased somewhat.
But the implants wired directly into her nervous system had already caused irreversible damage.
"Sandevistan and Kerenzikov—those are standard combat implants," Viktor said as he examined the data panel. "But this is reckless. Piling on a pain editor and reflex tuner on top of that—even if the hardware were functioning perfectly—would still overload the body."
"Stacking implants that crudely without undergoing deep-body conversion first is basically attempted murder."
"So what now, Vik? Is there still hope for her?"
Luo Qi frowned. The real situation was much more complicated than he had guessed.
Plenty of people got chromed.
Plenty of people's implants malfunctioned.
But full-blown cyberpsychosis wasn't exactly everywhere all the time.
According to Trauma Team's own case definitions, cyberpsychosis was a blanket term for all anxiety-related mental and personality disorders triggered by implant hardware and associated behavioral modules, including software.
Put simply, cyberware was only the fuse and the catalyst.
What truly broke down was still the person's body and mind.
In Night City, almost everyone knew one or two stories like that: a neighbor got too much chrome, then one day walked outside with a gun and opened fire into a crowd. Or someone tried to save money and refused to see a qualified ripperdoc, ended up with constant nightmares and auditory hallucinations after taking hormone blockers, and finally snapped.
Some people said cyberpsychosis was a disease born from social inequality.
Others said it was simply the price of a pathological obsession with technology.
Still others claimed it was complete nonsense—
right up until the day they saw their own neighbor firing wildly outside the front door and had to call MaxTac.
"Cyberware modification has risks. Install with caution," Luo Qi sighed.
"Exactly. Listen to your doctor and respect science. That only lowers the risk, though." Viktor kept working while reaching for a scalpel.
"You're a ripperdoc. Saying that isn't exactly great for business, is it?" Luo Qi asked curiously.
"It's the truth. Or would you rather I just tell you what you want to hear?" Viktor said dryly. "Though I suppose I almost forgot—you don't install chrome."
As he worked, he chatted as casually as if he were carving up a slab of meat on a cutting board instead of cutting into a human being.
After a long time messing around inside, Viktor finally extracted a blood-smeared mechanical unit tangled with wires and tossed it onto the table.
"What's that?" Luo Qi poked at it curiously.
"A burnt-out reflex tuner. Once it starts leaking current, the person wearing it staggers around like they're drunk on counterfeit booze." Viktor turned back to the unconscious Mower and began repairing and suturing her wounds. "Looks like an experimental prototype. Doesn't even have a serial number."
"Ha. I knew it. No wonder she was fighting like an idiot," Luo Qi said in sudden realization.
"It interfaces directly with the central nervous system. When it malfunctions, the pain feels like someone tossed your spine into a vat of boiling oil. No wonder she lost her mind."
Viktor sighed. He had seen things like this often enough that it no longer shocked him, but that didn't mean it left him completely unmoved.
"So that means cyberpsychosis can be cured, then?"
"Not exactly." Viktor began wiping down the table as he explained. "If you'd brought her in any later, the overstimulation would've burned her out and killed her outright. Or, if she'd been even less lucky, she'd have become a full-blown lunatic living in a constant state of hellish pain."
That made sense.
Living in endless agony really was worse than death.
"So then… Militech really had no way to save her?" Luo Qi pointed at Mower, who looked half-dead on the chair. "Not questioning your skills. You know what I mean."
"I know." Viktor didn't take offense. "Militech has more than enough money. Finding a doctor like me wouldn't have been hard. But they probably assumed she was already fully gone. In that state, yes, there'd be no saving her. And if an experimental implant fails—especially on one of their own—then killing her means the company takes no reputational hit. At least, that's one benefit."
"More importantly, corporations don't keep useless people." Viktor sighed, carefully wiping down his own mechanical brace. "Once someone turns into a cyberpsycho, even if you remove the broken implant, the best-case scenario is they spend the rest of their life half-paralyzed and disabled."
"You should be grateful your luck held. If you'd come any later—or found a ripperdoc less skilled than me—you'd be figuring out what to do with a completely useless invalid right now."
With that, he moved over to his workbench, laid the malfunctioning implant under a lamp, and started dismantling it for study.
"I really don't know how to thank you. You always take care of us like this." Luo Qi nodded. "How much do I owe you?"
"You got money?" Viktor glanced back over his glasses with a small smile. "Keep it. Same rules as always—if you bring me cyberware, I count that as payment. And I'm serious: no knockoff junk. Standard issue, military grade, or things like this experimental model. Good or bad, I want all experimental pieces. I'm doing research."
"No, this time I actually do have money." Luo Qi grinned and pulled out a small pile of cash and chips. "Militech left bodies all over the place, and their cars were still sitting there too. If handling them hadn't been such a pain, I would've stripped the lot. No way I'd leave that behind out of kindness."
"Suit yourself." Viktor shook his head.
"Oh, right. Vik—when's she going to wake up?" Luo Qi asked, glancing at the unmoving Mower.
"A few hours, maybe less. Why?" Viktor looked at him. "I think I know already. This is about Dexter, isn't it?"
"Yeah. That's exactly it." Luo Qi's brow furrowed.
"You feel it too, right?" Viktor said, shaking his head. "I already told V what I thought. What he does with that is up to him now."
Then he added quietly, "Be careful."
Luo Qi trusted this man deeply.
Viktor treated V like a son, and cared a great deal about Luo Qi and Jackie too.
He could hear the concern hidden inside those simple words.
"Alright. Then I'll leave her here for now. I've still got things I need to do."
Viktor didn't look up. He just kept disassembling the implant and nodded.
When Luo Qi pushed open the basement door, the fresh night air mixed with the countless smells of the city rushed into his nose.
He checked his PDA.
A little after ten.
Tomorrow they'd smash through Maelstrom's hideout, meet T-Bug and Dexter face-to-face, and then head straight for Konpeki Plaza.
If they moved fast enough, maybe they could avoid that whole godawful circus.
Tonight—
he absolutely had to do more.
Join here to read ahead.
In Star Rail, Ultra-Beast Armored — Have I Caught "Equilibrium"? l (Chapter 80)
Uma Musume, But I Only Have Five Years Left to Live (Chapter 172)
Zenless Zone Zero: I'm a Doctor, Not a Bangboo (Chapter 115)
Ben Tennyson Wants to Join the Justice League (Chapter 116)
TYPE-MOON: Redemption Beginning with the Holy Grail War (Chapter105)
Yu-Gi-Oh! — Transmigrated into the White Dragon Girl (Chapter100)
"Is this chat group even serious?" (Chapter69)
I, Lord Ravager, Utterly Loyal! (Chapter119)
Can Playing Games Save the World? 65
Crossover Anime Multiverse: The Demon Hunter of an Unnatural World 70
From Junkman to Wasteland 60
Weekly Refresh of Overpowered 31
I'm Grinding Proficiency Like 40
From Kiana, Lord Ravager, Onwa 66
Honkai: Is This Still the Prev 42
Elf: My Starter Pokémon Is Inc 50
Warhammer: My Primarch Is Remi 52
From Demon Slayer to Grand Ass 55
The Way the Umamusume Look at 42
Uma Musume, but My Cheat Power 40
Naruto: Weaving the Future, Be 36
Zenless Zone Zero, but Kamen R 30
Multiverse Crossover: The Perf 26
My Cyberpsycho Girlfriend 26
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